Khance Meyers, Chantz Sawyers. Will employers give those two a chance?

Terroll Jolla. Say it slowly, otherwise it sounds like "troll."

Ojay Gibson. Mr. Gibson is a senior, which means he was born around 1999, four years after the Trial of the Century ended. By that point, of course, it was obvious to any unbiased parent-to-be that Mr. Simpson was innocent.

Prince Gaye. Think he takes any grief for that name?

Shaton Vaughn. He shat on his competition.

Champion Allison. His foresighted parents knew he would run 200 meters in 21.19.

Igo Grimes. He has a robust self-image.

Junior Desir. His son could be Junior Desir, Junior.

Dontavian Smith. Don't even think about it.

Quazier Dailey. His suburban opponents feel a little queasier when they see his name.

Roman Turner. Instead of naming their son Cassius or Marcellus or Octavious, his parents settled on a more generic alternative.

Armoni Brown. Were her parents thinking more in terms of harmony, our money, or Giorgio?

Zy'Shai Brown, Iantha Wright, Zaire Chest, Nyjah Young-Bey, Shante Robinson, T'Aja Cameron. If someone offered you 1000 to 1 odds, would you be willing to take the bet that any of these girls were white?

Shaun --I'm not sure the new names have taken hold in Trinidad. They've had a lot of influences, but they were basically a British colony for a long time, and they're located right off the coast of Venezuela. I suspect they're somewhat immune from current US fashions.

I don't like to suggest topics for your blog DEAR MISTER CRAIG (and I hope you are having a pleasant Easter holiday) but I figure you will do this guy (the Cleveland shooter) as a psychopath and but you might not run across this video

FAKE BABA --I'm not going to write post about the Cleveland shooter, he's too obvious a sociopath. It would be like writing a sociopath alert for Ted Bundy, no point to it.

Just watched three minutes of the video; he actually sounds somewhat normal, in a black sort of way, despite the chilling words.

Actually I've never heard that word pathognomic before, had to look it up.

My next sociopath alert will probably be about Tony Robbins, that one had been staring me in the face for a long time but I'd never really seen it, it just hit me a few days ago when I was idly reading about acromegalics.

I find it hard to believe that Tony Robbins is a sociopath. I've never researched his background extensively. He came from a challenging background, that's for sure. I've never heard anyone accuse him of being a pathological liar, the classic hallmark trait of anyone having the disorder. Your sociopath alert should be interesting. Disappointing if it's true.

Birdie --I have no doubt that he is. His family background, the fact that he's basically a snake oil salesman, his personal relationships, the way he talks about why he divorced his first wife, it's all of a piece.

I know a little bit about his upbringing - divorced parents, crazy mother, stepfathers, etc. I just assumed that he survived a difficult childhood, managing to overcome obstacles that were in his life. Maybe, I'll do my own research. I don't know what to think, being skeptical.

I hear black names in the usa are combinations of two names.Like Kimothy (kim and timothy) and Rayvon (raymond and vaughn)

The "La" and "De" are french parts made to make it sound more...Latin?They have formed their own ethnicity and dialect. Ebonics to me is just a dialect, I don't think of it as bad English, just "black" english.

Ga --In some cases, yeah, I guess that's true. A lot of them just seem like nonsense names, though, too, even if they do have a distinctive sound. There are a lot more "Q's" and "Z's" thrown in, plus a fair number seem to end in "-ious." And there are a lot of apostrophe marks. And they like royal titles as well, like Prince, or Queen, or Marquise. I know I'm being silly by focusing on something as superficial as names, but somehow the names seem to me to be symptomatic of something deeper.

A lot of normal English names may have originally been like that. When the Anglo-Saxons were still romping around as barbarians they must have made up some names from the Celtic, French, and Latin languages. Did they call themselves "Julia/Julius/Cassius/Cassia" like actual Romans? No the name "Adrian" is a mispronounced word from hadrianus (lit "from Hadria" a harbour or related to Hadrian's Wall that was built), which makes no sense to a native Roman speaker, like a black name such as "Asia" or "India" after a place.

Or what about "Quentin" which is from "quintus" (fifth) a bit nonsense choice for a British peasant. Why not something actually Roman like "Vergillius"? "Shaquille" which is from the arabic word "handsome" Shakeel, parallels this.

Whenever a people come under the influence of another (like the Anglo-Saxons under Roman rule) they try to fit in and make up names. Often they do a poor job of imitating (like the English nicknames chosen in Hong Kong) and mispronounce it into something else.

That is the symptomatic meaning I think you're looking for. Imitation of the culture you are in (like west african slaves brought to the USA trying to fit, so they replaced their old Yoruba, Akon, or Igbo names, or whatever christian name they were given by their owners with whatever is lying around once they were freed).

Or to add, like the name regular Austin which is from Augustus, a title name reserved only for upper members of the elite like the Emperors in Rome meaning "majestic". Added after their first and last names, given later in life sometimes and passed on. How a peasant aquired that name is the same way black people got name "Queen" or "Marquise". Trying to fit in, imitate, or create a new identity using a foreign language rather than getting it from one's own.

Ga --That doesn't quite account for the misspellings of English words, and English is theoretically the native language of many of the parents who name these children. for instance, I've seen versions of "Antoine" that include "Antwan" and "Antuan." Etc. Another common theme is that they take the names of things they associate with classiness, like high end automobiles; I've seen kids named "Mercedes" and "Lexus" and "Infiniti." (I know Mercedes the automobile was originally named after a woman, so the woman's name preceded the car's name; but given the prevalence of Lexus's and Infiniti's, I suspect these parents were naming their daughters after the cars.) I've also seen men given the names "Harvard," "Yale," and "Cornell."

But you make a good point, that the original English people who bastardized Latin names were guilty of a similar sin.

I think I know someone who can top these names. i taught on the west side of Chicago, so you can only imagine some of the doozies. I once had a student named Q'Pon. He had a twin brother who had a normal name. I guess his brother won the coin toss. All jokes aside, I can't think of a better way to fuck your kid up from the get go. Many studies have shown that employers toss resumes in the trash when they encounter these types of names. They probably, and rightfully so, associate these names with laziness, calling off, and theft.

As I stated earlier, I taught in the inner cities. I noticed that the parents or grandparents had normal names. This shows a devolving culture. Why do you suppose they give these names to their kids?

Maybe they spell it differently because they want to spell it how they pronounce it in their black accents. Like the example of mispronounced Latin words becoming Old English names. They spell Antwuan like that because thats how they say it. Like "aahntwuaaahn!".-Ga

Spartan --You taught in the inner city? Did you start out as a liberal? You've certainly come by your race realism honestly.

Yes, I've heard of those studies where the employers tend to discard resumes with identifiably lower class black names on them, which is what I was referring to in the post when I talked about Khance and Chantz.

I think it has to do with rejecting white culture. I think they'd feel as if they were knuckling under to The Man if they gave their kids names like Robert and William. And a little bit of it is thinking that if they give their kids a unique name, the kid himself will somehow turn out to be unique. (In fact, now that I think of it, I've seen the name "Unique.") And some of it is just illiteracy (misspelling regular names like Derek and Antoine).

My family experienced white flight in 1970 when I was six. Even at a young age, I was able to see certain differences. Chicago was very segregated. I received a great education when my parents would have to drive through black areas to get to white areas. I suppose I was always a realist. There were times that I thought things were the way they were because of racism. That ended when I saw nice white suburbs turn to crap once there was a demographic change. One group created a very desirable community, and the other group inherited it and ruined the quality of life. My views were solidified when I started teaching World Geography. If there were countless Black countries that were functional, then a good argument can be made that racism and slavery ruined Blacks. That's certainly not the case. I can't think of one Black society that I'd like to live in and raise my family. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Moldova, the poorest white country, has a better quality of life than any African country. Of course, the liberals will point out that colonialism is the cause. I always stump them when I ask why South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan are first rate countries.

I agree with you that the goofy names are a result of rejecting the white man's culture. They hate anything that resembles white, so they do the opposite. I now teach in magnet school that's racially mixed. The Black kids at the school have normal names. Of course, this has everything to do with them being raised in a functional environment.

In the same vein as Tony Robbins, I'd be interested in your thoughts on Joel Ostein.

He has to be the most disarming, charming MF'er ever. Seems impossible not to like, and very sincere. But I think he might just be a really, REALLY successful sociopath.

1. As a preacher, he purports (one assumes) to be a man guided by his belief in god and the christian ways.2. He runs his church as a business and accumulates fabulous, lavish wealth for himself.3. He keeps all/most/much of this wealth for himself.

Just the fact that he separates little old women from their retirement money and that he can justify buying a fourth Porsche (or whatever unnecessary extravagance) when that money could (in theory) be used to feed an African child, SEEMS to make his revealed beliefs to belie #1 the image discussed in #1 above. Like, if you are sincere in what you're saying to be your life mission, how can you hoard cash for yourself? There can't possibly be a way to reconcile that?

And yet he is so (seemingly) sincere that I can't possibly believe that about him? i think you'll come across as sociopath but very curious! This one would get a lot of hits I'm sure

I didn't quite come out and call him a sociopath, but I did describe his self-serving methods. Is he a sociopath? He could well be, but I don't really know enough about him to say. I basically agree with your take on him, though.

Maybe that says more about how bad English is spelled. "Ghoti"=Fish. "Featherstonehaugh"=Fanshaw

Least they don't use hieroglyphs like Japanese. But it still sucks.So I am ambivalent about how black people spell names. If it's ridiculous like "Abcde" (absidee I think), then yeah. But if they choose to spell Antoine as "Antwuan", I am more understanding.

Ga --All of the Romance languages are bastardizations of Latin, but those changes took place over roughly a millennium and a half. When D'Brickashaw Ferguson was given his name by his mother because she liked the character Father Ralph de Bricassart from "The Thorn Birds," that change took place in one generation, a much more rapid evolution, and that speed of "evolution" can only be caused by illiteracy.

"there's something absolutely fascinating about this cherubic, wholesome man who seems to exude constant warmth. (Generally the only people able to call up such constant, effusive sincerity are the totally insincere.)"Very insightful!

You're making a major mistake. "They" didn't start giving "their" children unique names. SHE (as in the single mother) began giving HER children unique names for one simple reason: as soon as the welfare money and food and apartments were up for grabs, she didn't have to worry about respectability or common sense any more. To be clear, giving free money and holes to attitudinal teenager girls because "slavery" was the stupidest idea in the history of America. We should all be glad that those young women gave their children "pretty sounding" names. After all, there are plenty of people in the world with James like Smapdi and Fnaarg.

About Me

Virtually everyone who knows John finds him completely tactless and insufferably opinionated. He sees himself as refreshingly honest. That said, this blog is still an excellent way to kill time while putting off work. If you're a newcomer, you might find browsing through the older posts an amusing waste of time as well.